Lego wants your old Legos back
If you have a box of old Lego bricks sitting unused in a garage, Lego now wants them back. In a new program, consumers in the U. S. can dump old bricks in a box, print a free shipping label, and send them off to Give Back Box, a social enterprise will clean the toys and repackage them for Teach for America and the Boys and Girls Club of Boston.
"The classic Lego brick is made from a tough material (call) ABS, and the toys can be played with for decades without breaking. It's already fairly common, of course, that Legos (hand) down from one child to another. "says Tim Brooks, vice president of corporate responsibility at Lego Group.
The company looked for a partner that could process the used toys while (maintain) Lego's standard of quality. "We want to make sure that all kids are getting a great experience, "he says." You shouldn't get a really inferior experience the bricks are donated. "If the program goes well, Brooks says, it expand.
He sees it one version of the circular economy, a system of keeping materials in use-and argues that the toys themselves illustrate the idea of the circular economy. "You can build a rocket and then you can take apart and build a ship, or a car, or a house, or you like, "Brooks says. As toys are reused, that's another circular system “We intend (show)that great quality toys like Lego can be used in lots of repeating circles-used, reused, donated, used, reused, donated."
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A. backup B. borderlines C. breathlessly D. connectivity E. deskbound F. divorcing G. functions I. presence H. interrupting J. reluctantly K. update |
How to work from home
There are many things that contribute to becoming a successful work-from-home employee. As more companies across nearly every industry accommodate an increasing number of employees wishing to avoid traffic jam and office cold lunch, remote work has become an increasingly easy and practical option for many who seek it. Here is a modest guide to becoming a successful remote employee.
Before completely from the office, check with your corporate IT department and your manager to see if you are equipped with the programs and applications necessary to work remotely. Security first: If you connect to your company's internal systems or email through a Virtual Private Network or other secure tunnel, make sure you've tested it and that it from where you plan to work. Also, have a(n) plan in the event your connection experiences disturbance.
The same advice applies to internet. I make sure that if the wireless internet in my home office fails, I can still connect seamlessly through my smartphone, set up as a Wi-Fi hot spot. To do this, make sure you have the right wireless plan, especially if you handle large files.
The ability to communicate quickly and reliably is the most priceless attribute a remote employee needs to succeed. Do your manager or boss frequently. Make sure they're installed and you know how to use them, and make your known to your colleagues when you are available and working.
Set if you're working at home by explaining to family members or children that your work area is off limits, and they should avoid unless it's important.
Find time to go for short walks to help inspire productivity and creativity. One of the blessings of working remotely is the opportunity to live a more active lifestyle instead of being , but it's important to make activity a habit.
Retailers(零售商) closed more than 9,000stores in 2019. Some people call what has happened to the shopping landscape "the retail1" It is easy to chalk it up to the rise of e-commerce, which has thrived while physical stores struggle. But this can be2. Online sales have grown tremendously in the last 20 years, but Internet shopping still represents only 11 percent of the entire retail sales total. Collectively, three major3forces have had an even bigger impact on brick-and-mortar retail than the Internet has.
To begin with, we have changed4we shop — away from smaller stores like those in malls and toward stand-alone “Big Box” stores, which is a greater problem for most physical stores.
Also, Rising income5has left less of the nation's money in the hands of the middle class, and the traditional retail stores that6them have suffered. It is estimates that since 1970, the share of the nation's income earned by families in the middle class has fallen from almost two-thirds to around 40 percent. As the7of income at the top rises, overall retail suffers simply because high-income people save a much larger share of their money. The government reports8for different income levels in the official Consumer Expenditure Survey. In the latest data, people in the top 10 percent of income9almost a third of their income after taxes. People in the middle of the income distribution spent 100 percent of their income.10, as the middle class has been squeezed and more has gone to the top, it has meant higher saving rates overall.
Lastly, We have spent11less of income on things and more on services. Since 1960, we went from spending 5 percent of our income on health to almost 18 percent, government statistics show. We spend more on education, entertainment, business services and all sorts of other products that aren't12in traditional retail stores. Economists debate theories of why we have 13to services and away from goods but no one questions that it has happened. It means that over time, retailers selling14will have to run harder and harder just to stay in place.
In short, the broad forces hitting retail are more a lesson in economics than in the power of15. It's a lesson all retailers will have to learn someday.
Katherine Jonson, winner of the presidential medial of freedom, refused to be limited by society5 expectations of her gender and race while expanding the borders of humanity's reach--President Barack Obama, 2015.
Using little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, who died at 101, calculated the precise path that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong's history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth Wet throughout Mrs. Johnson's 33 years in NASA's Flight Research Division and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name. She was just one of those unheralded women who, well before the modem feminist (女权) movement, worked as NASA mathematicians. But it was not only her gender that kept her long marginalized and long unsung Katherine Johnson, a West Virginia native, was also African-American.
But over time, the work of Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues--countless calculations done mainly by hand, using slide rules, chart paper and inefficient desktop calculating machines--won them a level of acceptance that for the most competitive race.
“NASA was a very professional organization, "Mrs. Johnson told The Observer of Fayetteville, N.C., in 2010. "They didn't have time to be concerned about what color I was." Nor, she said, did she. "I don't have a feeling of inferiority, "Mrs. Johnson said on at least one occasion. "Never had. I'm as good as anybody, but no better. "
To the end of her life, Mrs. Johnson refused praise for her role in sending astronauts into space, keeping them on course and bringing them safely home. "I was just doing my job, "Mrs. Johnson repeatedly said so. But what a job it was--done, no less, by a woman born at a time when the odds were more likely that she would die before age 35 than even finish high school.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is "UNICEF"?
UNICEF is the United Nations Children's Fund
When created in 1946 to help children in war-torn Europe, China and the Middle East, UNICEF stood for "United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund". In 1947, UNICEF USA was founded, one year after UNICEF, to support UNICEF's lifesaving work for children
By 1953, UNICEF's task was extended to address the needs of children in the developing world. At that time, the words "international" and "emergency" were dropped from the organization's name, making it simply the United Nations Children's Fund. UNICEF has helped save more children's lives than any other humanitarian organization.
What is UNICEF USA's mission?
We work for the survival, protection and development of children worldwide through fundraising, advocacy and education.
How can I volunteer for UNICEF in the field?
UNICEF secures volunteers, who must have at least a Bachelor's Degree and two-to-five years' experience in their field of expert knowledge and skills, through the United Nations Volunteers program.
If you are a citizen of the United States and meet the above standards, send your resume to the United Nations Volunteers program at the following address for more information: United Nations Volunteers, c/o Peace Corps, 1111 20th St. N. W, Washington, DC 20526.
If you are interested in volunteering within the United States, click here to learn how.
May I donate non-cash goods for emergency relief?
Some have asked us about donating goods here in the U. S. for emergency relief efforts abroad. While we are grateful for the desire to help, UNICEF does not accept non-cash goods. Why?
Financial donations are the fastest and most efficient way to provide assistance. Donated goods must be screened, sorted, stored and transported. UNICEF pre-positions supplies to speed up delivery and sources them locally whenever possible. A blanket donated today can take weeks, or even months, to arrive abroad. A dollar donated today, however, will be arranged tomorrow to buy lifesaving supplies.
We also purchase supplies in large quantities to save money. That means your financial donation will get more supplies to more kids in need than your donation of non-cash goods.
Scientists in Antarctica have recorded, for the first time, unusually warm water beneath a glacier (冰川)the size of Florida that is already melting and contributing to a rise in sea levels.
The researchers, working on the Thwaites Glacier, recorded water temperatures at the base of the ice of more than 2℃, above the normal freezing point. Critically, the measurements were taken at the glacier's grounding line, the area where it transforms from resting wholly on bedrock to spreading out on the sea as ice shelves. It is unclear how fast the glacier is getting worse: Studies have forecast its total collapse in a century or in a few decades. The presence of warm water in the grounding line may support estimates at the faster range.
That is worthy of attention because the Thwaites, along with the Pine Island Glacier and several smaller glaciers, acts as a brake on part of the much larger West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which if melted, would raise the world's oceans by more than a meter over centuries, an amount that would put many coastal cities underwater.
"Warm waters in this part of the world, as remote as they may seem, should serve as a warning to all of us about the potential terrible changes to the planet brought about by climate change," said David Holland, director of New York University's Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
Glaciologists have previously raised alarm over the presence of warm water melting the Thwaites from below. This is the first time, though, that warm waters have been measured at the glacier's grounding line.
To observe activity beneath the glacier, Dr. Holland's team drilled a hole -about 30 centimeters wide and 600 meters deep-from the surface to the bottom and then placed equipment that measures water temperature and ocean turbulence, or the mixing of freshwater from the glacier and salty ocean water. Collecting the data took about 96 hours in subzero weather. Warm waters beneath the Thwaites are actively melting it, the team found.
While scientists may not yet be able to definitively predict how soon glaciers like the Thwaites will melt, human-caused climate change is a key factor. The biggest predictor of "how much ice we will lose and how quickly we will lose it, "Dr. Holland said, "is human action."
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A. Research has shown that different threats push different psychological buttons. B. It's also important that the content and tone of communications speak to the intended audience. C. Giving people concrete, detailed actions to take can help reduce panic and overreaction when a new threat emerges. D. In response, psychologists are helping governments and other groups communicate real risk levels to the public to help make sure actions meet needs. E. The discipline is very straightforward: Identify the few things that people most need to know and figure out how to explain them in clear, trustworthy terms. F. We need to step back and allow for high emotions and missteps by people as long as we help them make well-informed decisions that eventually protect them. |
Framing risk, reducing panic
For four decades, psychologists have studied how people see risk and what causes them to overreact to terrorist attacks and other extreme events. Those misplaced reactions can lead to the shame of people and prevention of daily activities, causing a new set of problems on top of a current crisis.
Timely, honest communication from a source an audience considers credible is essential to containing fear, but governments have the tough job of explaining risk and telling people how to act without also seeding alarm.
Messages may be more helpful when delivered in creative formats. Visuals are very powerful. We can't just tell people things, we have to show them. When people are using the more primary part of their brain, visuals are more powerful than our higher order tools, including language.
People can understand just about anything if you do your job right as a communicator. That includes keeping it simple and communicating what people need to know, versus what is nice to know, expressing risk in numbers--"there's a 30 percent chance of rain"--and reminding people of the opportunity cost of waiting for more evidence.
Psychologists working in the field of risk communication assume we have too much control through our messaging.
Does your memory fail as you age?
I'm 62 years old. Like many of my friends, I forget names that I used to be able to recall effortlessly. When packing my suitcase for a trip. I walk to the bedroom and by the time I get there, I don't remember what I came for. And yet my long-term memories are perfect. I remember the names of my third-grade classmates, the first record album I bought my wedding day.
This is widely understood to be a classic problem of aging. But the problem is not necessarily age-related I've been teaching undergraduates for my entire career and I can prove that even 20-year-olds make short-term memory errors- loads of them. They walk into the wrong classroom; they show up to exams without the required No. 2 pencil; they forget something I just said two minutes before. These are similar to the kinds of things 70-year-olds do.
The relevant difference is not age but rather how we describe these events, the stories we tell ourselves about them. Twenty-year-olds don't think, "Oh dear, this must be early-onset Alzheimer (早老性痴呆症) ." They think," I really need to get more than four hours of sleep." The 70-year-olds observe these same events and worry about their brain health. This is to say that every error of short-term memory doesn't necessarily indicate a biological disorder.
So how do we account for our subjective experience that older adults seem to search for words and names with difficulty? First, there is a generalized cognitive(认知的) slowing with age-but given a little more time, older adults perform just fine. Second, older adults have to search through more memories than younger adults to find the fact or piece of information they're looking for. Your brain becomes crowded with memories and information. It's not that you can't remember-you can -it's just that there is so much more information to sort through.
你校学生会正开展主题为“The first job I want to take”的英语征文比赛，请你撰文参加（文中请不要出现真实的校名和人名)。你的征文内容需包括：
1）离开校园、步入社会后，你想从事的第一份职业是什么；
2）你想从事这份职业的原因(可从个人特点、职业价值等方面进行阐述）。
